


K'usharah

by draculard



Category: Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Angst, But with mild references to Chaos Rising, Exile, F/M, Homesickness, Hurt No Comfort, Languages and Linguistics, Loneliness, Takes place mostly during Alliances and Treason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:02:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26722594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: K'usharah:verb, Cheunh:to forget.
Relationships: Ar'alani/Thrawn | Mitth'raw'nuruodo
Comments: 26
Kudos: 46





	K'usharah

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/gifts).



She didn't recognize his voice the first time she spoke to him after exile. His face, yes; his eyes, of course; his heatshadow, even over comm. But his voice was different. 

_Has his accent always sounded like that?_ Ar’alani thought.

For a moment, she forgot to return Thrawn’s greeting. He had a Rentor accent the first time she met him; coarse and lower-class, and at complete odds with the soft, even tones of his voice. But he was good at accents; he’d adapted quickly to Csilla-standard, copying Syndics and the few blood family members he knew — Ar’alani included. She hadn’t heard his native accent in years.

And this, she realized over the course of their conversation, wasn’t it.

This was a softening of consonants — an atypical strain on the occasional throaty hiss demanded by Cheunh — the wrong tone here and there on his glottal stops. 

“It’s good to see you,” Thrawn said, and his cadence came out subtly wrong. 

“And you,” Ar’alani responded, feeling dazed. She had the unmistakable sense that she was speaking to a foreigner, someone expertly educated in Cheunh, but who would never quite manage to sound native. She glanced down at his rank plaque, then back at his face, reminding herself that this was still Thrawn. “What rank is that?” she asked him. She’d never bothered to learn with Imperials.

Touching the plaque lightly, Thrawn said, “Admiral.” He gave her a slight, wry smile, the kind he always used when he was teasing her. “We’re equals now.”

Ar’alani felt some of her tension melt away at that, even if the stress he put on the word ‘equals’ was all wrong. She snorted and shook her head. “Please. An Imperial admiral is probably no better than a Chiss lieutenant. You’ve been demoted, if anything.”

His lips twitched, his smile growing brighter for a half-second before fading away. He didn’t speak.

And Ar’alani found herself staring again. At his rank plaque. At his uniform. At the lines under his eyes and the stark grey durasteel behind him. There was no beauty in Imperial ships, she thought. It was all bleak, all economical, no sense of culture or design. At least, none that she could discern. Thrawn could, she knew, but did he like what he saw in the walls around him? Or was he as miserable looking at that steel cage as she was?

“How many years has it been?” she asked him. “Your time.”

He looked at her, his expression difficult even for her to read. “Five years,” he said heavily. “And in the Ascendancy?”

She shouldn’t admit that she knew the exact number of days. Chewing her lip, Ar’alani flubbed the number a little. “Thirteen _il’yasa_ ,” she said. 

Thrawn nodded, as if he’d expected as much. “You’ll be celebrating Longest Night soon,” he noted.

They’d celebrated it last week. Ar’alani didn’t tell him; she only nodded her head. And then, because she couldn’t help herself, she asked him, “Have you spoken to anyone since you left? Other than me?”

He gave her a strange look. “Of course not,” he said, not defensively, but slowly, as if confused by the question. And he probably was; he’d been under strict orders not to contact anyone, after all, and he probably thought Ar'alani should have the utmost confidence in him that he'd never break an order. He studied Ar’alani’s face, but he evidently found no answers there. “Why do you ask?” he said.

Because his accent had changed, she thought. Because he clearly hadn’t spoken Cheunh once in the five years he’d been away. Because he was out of practice, rusty, and now the elegant tones of Cheunh sounded like a clumsy second language in his mouth.

Ar’alani swallowed, her throat dry. 

“No reason,” she said.

* * *

The human he sent her was put into Cheunh lessons as soon as he arrived, but he was still atrocious at speaking it by the time Ar’alani contacted Thrawn with her latest update on Csilla. She banished Vanto from the room entirely, knowing his reading and speaking skills were too abysmal to be of any use during the meeting — and knowing, too, that Thrawn would insist they speak in Sy Bisti for the human’s benefit, and then Ar’alani would be at a disadvantage and absolutely nothing would get done.

Still, when she saw the look of dashed expectations on Thrawn’s face, she felt a little guilty for sending Vanto away. 

Not quite guilty enough to _show_ it, but still. 

She started with the information he’d requested — yes, the sky-walkers he’d rescued from Batuu had been returned to their families. And their post-trauma assessments were looking well, with few behavioral issues outside the norm, and plenty of emotional support. Yes, they were safe, so far as she knew. No, the perpetrators had not been discovered. Not yet. Probably never, she added mentally. She didn't say this part aloud; a sensitive issue for Thrawn, sky-walkers.

She gathered the reports she’d had written up over the event and sent them Thrawn's way. Over comm, she heard the ping of his outdated-looking, bulky questis a moment later and studied him while he read.

“Are you well?” she asked, her voice stiff.

He didn’t glance up from the reports. “Fine, perfectly,” he said. There were bags beneath his eyes and a dull indigo flush across his cheekbones that indicated a mild fever. 

“The Emperor’s sidekick,” said Ar’alani with distaste, remembering the peculiar armored Imperial with the ventilator who’d tried to intimidate Thrawn into letting him see her when she came for the Chiss children days before. 

“Darth Vader has exhausted everyone here,” Thrawn agreed. His eyes were still on the questis. She watched as he sat back in his chair, slouching against it with a sigh. She could see the camera shake as he put his feet up on the desk. 

When the silence wore on, Ar’alani searched her mind for something to say.

“He seems an unpleasant ally,” she said finally. “Is it true he has the Sight?”

For a moment, Thrawn didn’t answer. He pressed a button on his questis, eyes flickering across the page. There was a harsh line between his eyebrows as he read. 

He should have been done by now, Ar’alani thought. The report wasn’t that long — and Thrawn was an exceptionally fast reader. To fill the time, she told him, “The sky-walkers said he was able to lift objects through his species’ version of the Sight.”

“Yes,” said Thrawn absently. “The Force. That's what they call it.”

“The Force,” Ar’alani repeated, wrinkling her nose. “A childish name, isn’t it? Almost brutal in nature.”

Thrawn didn’t answer.

“Well, it suits him,” Ar’alani said, and before she’d quite finished speaking, Thrawn glanced up and interrupted her.

“Please,” he said, lines of discomfort on his face. “Don't speak. I need to concentrate.”

Ar’alani maintained eye contact but held her breath, trying to make this request fit with the Thrawn she remembered. He’d requested silence once or twice, she remembered — during battle, so he could think through his strategy uninterrupted. Or during his meditations on art. But she distinctly remembered, too, how he’d held in-depth conversations when they were younger or maintained a precise countdown in his head while also reading complex datafiles on his questis. And this report wasn't exactly dense material. 

She studied him, saying nothing, acceding to his request. At the same time, surreptitiously, she called the reports up on her own questis — sleekly designed, palm-fitted, vastly superior to the Imperial version — and read them through herself.

Once. Twice. Three times.

She glanced up. Thrawn was still reading, the lines of tension on his face standing out more than ever before. His flush had grown darker.

“You’re ill,” Ar’alani told him, calculating his temperature in her head. She no longer felt like pretending he was fine.

The flush disappeared as Thrawn looked at her. The lines of tension disappeared as well. Ar’alani felt realization wash over her in a cold wave — even Thrawn couldn’t control a fever, but he could certainly control his _emotions_ , and he knew how to hide a blush. She'd seen him do it before; he'd told her once that he remembered training for the Taharim swim test in Rentor's icy waters in order to force his body temperature back down.

He wasn’t ill at all. He was _embarrassed_.

And the reason, she realized with a spike of embarrassment herself, was because this report was in Cheunh. His native language.

His native language, with a script he hadn’t had the chance to even _see_ in almost seven years. And which he was now struggling to read at all, moving through the report no faster than a cave-snail. 

As if he could read her mind — or more likely, her facial expression — Thrawn drew himself up and erased the last hints of exhaustion from his face. 

“Forgive me,” he said, his tone even. “Perhaps I should read this first and call you back, Admiral. I don’t wish to waste your time.”

Ar’alani inclined her head, part of her glad that he’d given her an out, the other part still trying to think of anything she could say to address the situation without embarrassing him further. She heard herself say, “Of course,” even as she was struggling to come up with the right thing to say.

He cut the comm before she could.

* * *

One day later — early in the cycle — he called her again to go over the reports in detail. He looked even more exhausted than before, Ar’alani thought, but he maintained his military bearing with a stiff professionalism that partially made her proud and partially saddened her.

He went over the reports in clipped tones, keeping his eyes on his questis. Halfway through he said,

“I found this part most concerning. The lack of reaction from the Irizi household, particularly in response to queries from a former blood member, must be noted.” He scrolled on his questis, scanning for the portions he’d highlighted. “As for the Mitth family, I am unsurprised but equally concerned. Perhaps a ranking distant would be more forthcoming than a Syndic or Aristocra. But I suspect the…”

His eyes kept scanning. His hand froze over the questis, not scrolling, just hovering above the screen. After a long moment, he dropped it to his side and stopped reading, his eyes fixed on a single point.

“Thrawn?” Ar’alani prompted.

His eyes weren’t focused, she realized. There was a line between his eyebrows and a pinched frown on his lips, but his eyes were far away. 

“I…” he started, and then stopped again, his frown deepening. He focused on his questis again, but without the energy he’d had before, scrolling half-heartedly down the page. After a moment, he stopped again and let the questis drop. “I suspect the… ah…”

“Yes?” Ar’alani said.

He glanced her way, and for a moment she caught something like nervousness in his eyes. 

“I suspect the _omnyomba wela ndabu,_ ” he said with a hesitance in his voice that bordered on painful.

Silence rang between them. Ar’alani stared at the viewscreen on her questis, fighting against the reflexive twitch of her eyebrows that showed Thrawn how confused she was. He’d switched from Cheunh to Sy Bisti — he’d never done that before unless they were in the presence of humans, or other aliens who didn’t speak Cheunh. 

She stared at him for a long time, trying to read his face. Part of her was automatically certain a human must have entered the room and was now lingering outside the holopod's vision range — but if that were so, Thrawn wouldn’t switch languages to make it easier for the human to eavesdrop. Not in his current situation, when secrecy was of the utmost importance. He would simply close the connection instead. 

And now he was avoiding her eyes.

“Are you asking me how to say _omnyomba wela ndabu?_ ” asked Ar’alani, a note of tentative disbelief in her voice.

Thrawn met her eyes with some difficulty. “It rests between my teeth,” he said — which was _not_ a Cheunh phrase, though he’d translated it appropriately enough. The Cheunh phrase, which he _should_ have said, was “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

“What you’re trying to say,” said Ar’alani slowly, not trying to condescend, “is ‘the crux of the matter.’” She pronounced the words in crisp Csilla-standard Cheunh.

Thrawn nodded with faint relief. “The crux of the matter,” he said, imitating her pronunciation — but not as well as he once had, when they were cadets at Taharim. “Yes.”

He smiled, a mortified, pained twitch of his lips that stabbed right to her heart. She smiled back, as if it were funny that he was forgetting his Cheunh. As if both of them were capable of laughing it off and moving on.

They returned to their work with a gulf between them that had nothing to do with space.

* * *

But it was nice to see him again, in person, she thought. To remind herself how little he had changed, even if his accent had softened, even if the uniform he wore was entirely different now, and he carried himself with more reserve and distance than she’d ever seen on him when they were young.

She could see him relaxing incrementally in her presence, despite the messiness of the situation. The Grysks — the open presence of Chiss military personnel on his Imperial ship — it hardly seemed to matter. By the time they reached the abandoned station to rescue the ‘dead’ Chiss sky-walker, Thrawn was almost his old self again.

They watched together as Vah’nya and Un’hee talked. And in the meantime, she and Thrawn chatted together, quietly and with a purpose, discussing their battle plans in Cheunh. It felt almost like old times, Ar’alani thought, even with his new uniform — even with the strange setting — even with the human officer who stood behind them both in a CEDF uniform, listening to them speak.

Eli’van’to said only one thing as they left, when the mission was over and done. He said it in hushed tones, out of Thrawn’s earshot, in the low voice of an inferior officer who isn’t sure he’s allowed to say what he wants to say.

“His accent is different from yours,” he said to her. Then, tentatively, knowing this sort of question was out of bounds, “Did he grow up somewhere else? Not on Csilla?”

“Yes,” said Ar’alani, and left it at that.

The truth was, Eli’van’to’s Cheunh was better now than Thrawn’s ever would be again.


End file.
